Waking up at 3:45 am isn’t the best way to start a conference. But it was the only way I could make it to Jean Tabaka’s session “Why I don’t like Mondays”. The effort paid off.
Jean’s talk riffs on the Boomtown Rats song “Why I don’t like Mondays” and poses the questions what’s wrong with Agile meetings and how to improve them. The presentation (pdf ) covered a lot of ground in 90 minutes:
- Top 10 Dysfunctions of team meetings (aka smells): Meetings are repetitive, Same people do all the talking every meeting, …
- How to fix the Monday Morning Blues: Purpose/Agenda, Ground Rules, Parking Lot, ORID, ….
- Creative ideas (Roger von Oech "Creative Whack Pack")
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Consider Meetings as mini iterations – they need to be planned and we should reflect on their outcomes.
- Use ORID in retrospectives
- Reflect briefly at the end of every meeting
- Get the team to set our ground rules (i.e. no phone calls, email, …)
If you missed the session grab the slide deck and read Jean’s book – Collaboration Explained (heck buy the book anyway I did).
Later in the day I also attend Diana Larsen’s "The First Thing to Build: Leveraging Trust on Agile Teams". I was a lot more tired by then and so struggled to stay awake let alone focus. Diana spent a lot of time discussing how to build trust on a team and spot when the team doesn’t have that trust. Slides (pdf again).
Sorry I don’t have the energy for a better set of notes. I suspect all of my postings this week will be rushed.
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Theres typos on the pdf files links. Theres a “)” in the end of on link and a “).” in the end of the another link.
Good pdf this “I dont like Mondays”, really good.